The Medium Post That Launched Everything
The Story
In 2019, Lenny Rachitsky wrote “What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business” on Medium. The post went viral, receiving 30,000+ claps (Source 4). Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky shared it internally across the company (Source 2).
A friend suggested he own his audience and move to Substack rather than continuing to publish on Medium (Source 2). He started writing to externalize learnings before forgetting them (Source 2).
He contributed guest posts to Andrew Chen’s blog and First Round Review, which drove 1,000+ subscribers (Source 2). Within nine months, he had 10,000+ subscribers (Source 2).
His first Substack post was published on June 14, 2019 (Source 3). He moved the newsletter from Medium to Substack in June 2020 (Source 3). For 10 months, he published free weekly posts before launching a paid tier (Source 3).
The single Medium post became the seed for what would grow into a 1M+ subscriber newsletter, a top 10 tech podcast, and an estimated $4M+ annual media business (Source 4).
Lesson for Creators
Lenny’s viral post wasn’t a calculated content strategy. It was a guy writing down what he learned before he forgot it. The post worked because it drew on 7 years of insider experience at one of the most interesting companies in tech. The lesson: your first viral piece is usually the one where you stop performing and start sharing what you actually know. The friend who suggested owning his audience on Substack instead of Medium made a suggestion worth millions.
Related
- Project Avoid Getting a Real Job — the exploration phase that produced this post
- Sixty-Five Thousand Dollars in Year One — the revenue that followed
- Snow White and Instant Book — what the original Airbnb post was about